Been thinking of new inventions that would make me a multi-thousandaire (just a few tax brackets away from being a multi-millionaire). I came up with The Lid Loosener™ (possibly already invented under the name of “can opener.” Not a very zingy marketing name.), Mouth Broom™ (same as a toothbrush, but with crazy larger bristles), and the Mud-Flinger™, a new kind of pooper scooper, one that employs catapult technologies to rid one’s lawn of animal “pebbles from heaven” souvenirs.

But the one I firmly believe will get me an in-ground swimming pool with all the trimmings (long hose, case of artificial food coloring, water), is my latest get-rich-right-now scheme: NASA Cover-ups™ — blacked out government UFO documents you can use to mask flying saucer-shaped table stains and/or use to put your refreshing adult beverages on to keep from staining the aforementioned Ikea™ table with one leg longer than the others.

Until I’m able to secure a patent number (or “No.”), here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not enrich your pool or wallet…

PSYCHOTIC! (January 26, 2018)
“This suspenseful psychedelic slasher follows a group of hard-partying Brooklyn hipsters as they’re stalked and savagely murdered by a masked maniac known as the Bushwick Party Killer. It’s up to struggling artists Tim and Stuart to figure out who keeps killing the life of the party.”

Hard-partying hipsters? Does that mean they drink three Zimas™ instead of two before passing out at a Rave? Comb their mall styled hair in an opposing direction? Use trendy/trending swear words they found on the Internet? Probably all of the above.

ALTERED CARBON (February 2, 2018/Netflix™)
“Altered Carbon is an intriguing story of murder, love, sex, and betrayal, set more than 300 years in the future. Society has been transformed by new technology: consciousness can be digitized; human bodies are interchangeable; death is no longer permanent.”

I wish my carbon to be altered as soon as future science is able. I’d transfer my digital leavings into a WWE wrestler husk host and recycle my former skin bag in the toilet/garbage disposal/neighbor’s yard (see “Mud-Flinger™”)

CURVATURE (February 23, 2018)
“A scientist must break into a top-secret facility in order to travel back in time and prevent a murder after receiving a mysterious phone call from herself.”

If it was me, I’d probably make a crank phone call to myself. (No doubt I’d fall for it, too.) Still, wish I could travel back in time, though. Two things would happen — I’d never have to wash my pants. That, and I’d be able to re-drink the same refreshing adult beverage over and over without paying for it more than once. Traveling through time is sweet.

THE WANDERERS: QUEST OF THE DEMON HUNTER (March, 2018/UK)
“Experienced vampire hunterLouis Moudon and his companion, a journalist, arrive in an isolated village in Transylvania to investigate the mystery surrounding a strange event. Along with their guide, young local Sorana, and the reality show team, they will find out that the villagers are experiencing a terrible dread. Louis will soon have to face a totally surprising discovery.”

The title is too long. Tried saying it out loud and my tongue got tired halfway through and just hung out of my mouth like a piece of pre-sliced bologna. If I was an experienced vampire hunter (oh, wait — I am), I’d insist on changing the movie’s title to In The NECK of Time.

Picking up where Decadent Evil (2005) left off, Ivan’s body (the legendary midget vampire hunter) lies in state. Meaning he’s dead…sort of…and being carried around in a duffel bag by a supermodel vampire named Sugar. (A nod to Basket Case/1982, perhaps?)

Also along for the ride is the midget vampire’s dad — Marvin the homunculus — being kept in a birdcage because he’s been turned into a shrunken red puppet. He can only grunt, but Sugar has no problem understanding him. This makes her human boyfriend understandably jealous. I would be.

Following clues that will lead to the king vampire and possibly a way to resurrect Marvin’s sorta dead son, Sugar and her non-bloodsucking mattress mate get jobs at a local strip club: She does Texas lap dances for cash (with her top on), he sprays antiseptic on the urinals. They believe the club owner is the king vampire whose been eating neck bacon and leaving the bodies along the Interstate.

In order for him to become invincible he needs to leave perma-hickeys on 10,000 blood-gooshing throats — and he has two left to go. Helping him is a couple other vampires —another stripper that doesn’t take her top off and the club’s bouncer.

But the jig is up for Sugar and her knob of a boyfriend. Taken to a junkyard for the final ritual, the pants lamely get pulled down on the king vampire who turns out to be somebody you didn’t think would be a king vampire. If you were paying attention to the “plot” you would’ve figured it out halfway in.

A can of tomato juice costs more than Decadent Evil II’s (2007) entire crap ass special effects budget. And what’s up with all the strippers not stripping? Yep, can’t wait to give all my money to girls to wear clothes. And if there’s anything worse about this 3rd grade script, it’s the final scene where a hottie vampire — tied to a bed with rope and bulbs of garlic — is served up doggy style by the shrunken red puppet. As entertainment value goes, though, you’re better off playing with your own shrunken red puppet.

Growing up reading comic books (before they were called “graphic novels” and charging adult money for ’em), the superheroes ALWAYS went to great lengths to keep their secret identity secret. Not so on the lightweight but still entertaining TV shows The Flash, Arrow and Supergirl — there are dozens of people who know who they are in non-hero mode and what they do when they take their crime fighting uniforms off.

Each of these superheroes better hope I don’t move to one of their cities and go all loose lip after sipping a casual 10 Budweisers™. Then again, I have need for someone with meta-human skills, so maybe we could work something out. You scratch my cape, I’ll scratch yours.

That said, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not require 10 relaxing Budweisers™ to enjoy…

AARON’S BLOOD (June 2, 2017)
“Aaron copes with his new life as a single father and the distant relationship he shares with his only child Tate. A timid hemophiliac, Tate is roughed up at school by the chief bully causing a massive nosebleed that lands him in the hospital fighting for his life. He makes a miraculous recovery after a necessary blood transfusion, but Aaron begins to notice progressively strange behaviors in his son. Faced with the grim possibility that his son could be becoming a vampire, Aaron enlists the help of a local vampire hunter and embarks on a frantic search to find the source of the infection to stop the transformation before it’s too late.”

That’d suck up one side and down the other to get a nosebleed that pretty much drains your entire body of the good stuff. As for the tainted blood transfusion, becoming a vampire because of it should be the least of your worries; blood donors are well-known disease factories. I heartedly recommend drinking adult beverages to cleanse the blood supply. Like Clorox Wipes™ the alcohol content alone can kill off most pathogens, supernatural or otherwise.

THE BAD BATCH (June 23, 2017)
“Arlen is unceremoniously dumped in a Texas wasteland fenced off from civilized society. While trying to orient her unforgiving environment, she’s captured by a savage band of cannibals and quickly realizes she’ll have to fight her way through her new reality. As Arlen adjusts to life in ‘the bad batch’ she discovers that being good or bad mostly depends on who you’re standing next to.”

The Bad Batch has been described as “a savage dystopian cannibal fairy tale set in a Texas wasteland where society’s rejects are just trying to make ends meat.” That’s pretty dang gosh darn funny. I know — language. Sometimes I resort to gutter speak to get my point across. Apologies. Couple things — this is a semi-big budget movie with legit big names. Secondly, since when did cannibals become mainstream? What’s next — slashers working at the local butcher store? Sometimes I just don’t get this gosh danged (I know, swear jar) world we live in.

So your red flags didn’t go up prior to the great idea of taking a deadly drug? You’ve got bigger problems than deep paranoia. P.S. Don’t do drugs.

BITCH (2017)
“Jill, a lonely, distraught housewife with four unruly children, paces on her dining room table with a belt around her neck, contemplating a desperate end to her wretchedness. Her husband, Bill, focused on his identity as breadwinner and an affair with a lusty co-worker, is as oblivious to Jill’s growing terror that she will do something destructive as he is to the panic at his unraveling company. Meanwhile, dogs bark and howl through the night, as one persistent mutt continually stalks the family’s yard. When Jill’s psyche finally breaks, she takes on a vicious new canine persona.”

A woman mood swings herself into becoming a dog? Hold your Lassie jokes — this could actually be fun/funny. Really hoping she doesn’t get the urge to sniff butts and…I should probably stop talking.

Chin Siu-ho, star of Mr. Vampire (1985), has a problem. He just moved into a functioning slum apartment building with the intention of committing suicide (his wife left him). But while hanging from an overhead fan (he must be in one of the deluxe slum units), twin chick ghosts materialize at the opportunity and take over his soon-to-be dead body. Carpe diem.

Before this can come to fruition, Yau, a chain-smoking downstairs neighbor in his boxers and robe, busts down the door, battles the ghost gals and makes them go back in the wall from whence they came. Behold the power of boxers and robes. Yau, if you haven’t deduced, is a retired vampire hunter. And he has to un-retire to smack those ghost chick creatures.

Elsewhere in the stylish squalor, Tung, a foul-mouthed old man, tells his wife Meiyi he’s going on a saki bender for a few days. He unfortunately falls face first down the hi-rise stairs and splat dies. Fortunately, there’s a black magic expert also living in the building. Gau helps the market fresh widow preserve the body in the bathtub in voodoo dirt and puts a voodoo chain mask on him, advising her to never remove the mask. Mask comes off, Tung turns into a jiangshi. (Wikipedia: Chinese “hopping” vampire, ghost, or zombie, a type of reanimated corpse in Chinese legends and folklore.)

Not sure how this all ties together, especially when informed that glutinous rice is used to combat vampires. Yau tells Chin Siu-ho that after all the vampires are vanquished, vampire hunters become restaurant owners/cooks as they need a job and they’re pretty good making rice. You never think of these things.

All these ingredients come to a boil as Yau, never bothering to put on his pants, teams with Chin Siu-ho and has a holy throw down with the ghost chicks, who have blood tendrils coming out of every orifice. Then they have to deal with Tung, whose hopping all over the place and causing grievous bodily harm. And I thought my apartment building was bad.

Rigor Mortis (2013) is strikingly atmospheric and loaded with grim and gruesome visuals. The in-house vamps will goon you out, especially when a flashback tells you how they became ghosts, a short but vicious sequence. My only complaint to an otherwise solid horror movie is they didn’t show you how to cook glutinous rice. Whenever I make it, the dang stuff sticks to everything. And it’s pretty much useless against the vampires in my apartment building. Maybe I need to add garlic butter or something.

STAKE LAND II (February 7, 2017 / digital, February 14 / DVD)
“Set several years after the events in Stake Land (2010), in which mankind must struggle to survive in the wake of a vampire apocalypse. When his home in New Eden is destroyed by a revitalized Brotherhood and its new Vamp leader, Martin finds himself alone in the badlands of America with only the distant memory of his mentor, the legendary vampire hunter Mister, to guide him. Roaming the wilderness of a steadily decaying country, Martin searches for the one man who can help him exact revenge.”

Revenge. Where would horror movies be without it? One of the best summations of revenge comes from City of Bones (2007) author Cassandra Clare’s first book in The Mortal Instruments series: “I don’t want tea,” said Clary, with muffled force. “I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them.”

“Unfortunately,” said Hodge, “we’re all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it’s either tea or nothing.”

Snap! I gotta use that line somewhere. Oh, wait — I just did.

SPECTRAL (December 9, 2016 / Netflix)
“When an otherworldly force wreaks havoc on a war-torn European city, an engineer teams up with an elite Special Ops unit to stop it.”

Now there’s a grand idea — get a bunch of Army guys to shoot guns at ghosts. Why not just whip out your AK-47 and unleash hell on Mr. Bubble™?

WAIT TILL HELEN COMES (out now / Lifetime, January 2017 / VOD)
“The story centers on a 12-year-old girl who’s the eldest of three children in a blended family that moves from Baltimore into a house converted from a church in the Maryland countryside. The tormented ghost of a little girl comes to haunt the 12-year-old, but forms an intimate, though dangerous, friendship with her seven-year-old stepsister.”

Warning: as this is airing on the Lifetime™ channel, it’s a family-friendly, watered down tale of the supernatural. Too bad; a little blood and guts never hurt anybody. Oh wait…

SLASHER.COM (2017)
“Slasher.com combines the time-honored tradition of young people facing unfathomable horrors in the wilderness with the every day horror of meeting people online, and puts a gruesome twist on the perils of modern dating.”

Slasher social media horror. Maybe they should rename it DeFacebook.com. Heh.

For a movie about vampires to call itself Bloodsuckers (2005) makes you wonder who got paid to come up with it. If it was more than a dollar, they were over-paid. Fortunately, someone kinda sort a fixed it when the made-for-TV sci-fi flick was retitled Vampire Wars: Battle For The Universe. Still dumb, but not Bloodsuckers dumb.

In the future we find that the universe is being scourged by a snack-pack variety of vampires. Teams of vampire hunters roam the galaxy and shout “lock ’n load, people” pseudo-military slogans and do a lot of synchronized posing.

One such team has a hot vampire chick working with them (she can smell vampire B.O., even in space), who has to drink plasma (space term for blood) instead of “snecking.” (Snacking on necks.)

They land on an abandoned planet, only to discover the place is overrun with dozens, maybe even a hundred dozen vampires. Seems some disenchanted Earth people have teamed up with the vampires to eliminate humans throughout the star system because they’re fed up with humans acting so aggressively towards EVERYTHING.

No flinching on the gore and cannibalism (some vampires eat the flesh of their victims as though it were Red Vines™), and if you can put up with the painful dialogue (“That their genetics were merged by the vampirazation process was of profound interest.”) you’ll be rewarded with a talking chest-burster parasite (i.e., phallic-shaped sock puppet), and the super hot vampire chick offering to have sex with the captain to get him to relax.

Because sex with a vampire can be fatal (I’m willing to risk it), she does the whole “tantric non-touching” space boot-knocking that’s alledgedly mind-blowing. Thanks, but in the future I’ll stick with making out with a lunar chick in the back seat of my space pod. (I hope I can afford one of those in the future. Space pod, not a lunar chick.)